Cleanup day comes to Manila Bay

MANILA, Philippines — Hundreds of volunteers joined a mass cleanup drive along the coast of the polluted Manila Bay, including the Dolomite Beach, to mark International Coastal Cleanup Day yesterday.

Volunteers and government workers, including hundreds of coast guard personnel, collected sachets, rubber slippers and other non-biodegradable waste that washed up in the Manila Bay, a 60-kilometer semi-enclosed estuary facing the West Philippine Sea.

“This initiative will help make our coastal area in Manila Bay better so that our tourists and visitors will see the beauty of the bay,” college student Kendrick Lopez, 18, told Reuters during the cleanup drive.

Waters along the Manila Bay, famous for its idyllic sunsets, are heavily polluted by oil, grease and trash from nearby residential areas and ports.

The Philippines is rich in marine resources, with nearly 36,300 km of coastline in the archipelago of more than 7,600 islands.

But it is the world’s top polluter when it comes to releasing plastic waste into the ocean, accounting for roughly a third of the total, according to an April 2022 report by the University of Oxford’s Our World in Data, a scientific online publication.

Over a thousand sacks of trash were collected from 6 a.m. to 9 a.m. yesterday, said John Ybañez of the Philippine Coast Guard’s (PCG) Public Information Office.
“We need to do these (cleanup drives) for our environment and to discourage people from throwing trash on the seaside,” Janet Panganiban, a 36-year-old volunteer, told Reuters.

The PCG was joined by volunteers organized by various agencies of government and even Manila residents led by the city government of Mayor Honey Lacuna-Pangan.
In the Navotas City stretch of Manila Bay, over 150 volunteers collected trash on the shores of Barangays Bagumbayan North, Tangos North and Tangos South as Mayor John Rey Tiangco encouraged his constituents to make coastal cleanup drives a habit.

Critics say laws regulating solid waste are inadequate and poorly enforced, leaving governments and communities struggling to address the pollution crisis.

International Coastal Cleanup Day is held every third Saturday of September to raise awareness of the growing garbage problems affecting coastlines around the world. –  Ghio Ong